What Does Arundhati Roy Reveal About the Communist Movement in The God of Small Things?
Arundhati Roy reveals that the Communist movement in Kerala, despite its revolutionary rhetoric about equality and social justice, fundamentally failed to challenge the deeply entrenched caste system that structures Indian society. Through the character of Velutha, an untouchable who becomes a committed Communist Party member, Roy demonstrates the tragic gap between the movement’s ideological promises and its practical betrayal of lower-caste members when confronted with actual caste transgressions. The novel exposes how Communist leaders in Kerala maintained their own privilege by selectively applying revolutionary principles, championing workers’ rights while refusing to dismantle caste hierarchies that benefited upper-caste communists. Roy portrays the movement as ultimately complicit in preserving traditional power structures, particularly when party members prioritize social respectability over ideological consistency. The Communist Party’s abandonment of Velutha when he most needs support—after his relationship with upper-caste Ammu is discovered—reveals that even supposedly radical political movements can reproduce the very oppression they claim to oppose, choosing comfortable reformism over genuine transformation.
How Does Roy Portray Communist Leadership in Kerala?
Roy portrays Communist leadership in Kerala as fundamentally hypocritical, composed primarily of upper-caste individuals who embrace Marxist ideology as an intellectual exercise while maintaining their privileged social positions and refusing to confront their own caste prejudices. The novel shows Communist Party members discussing revolution and workers’ rights in abstract theoretical terms while simultaneously treating lower-caste party members as subordinates rather than equals. Communist leaders in Ayemenem are depicted as opportunistic politicians who use Marxist rhetoric to gain power but have no genuine commitment to dismantling the social hierarchies from which they benefit. Roy emphasizes that Kerala’s Communist Party, despite being democratically elected and politically powerful during the novel’s timeframe, failed to address untouchability in any meaningful way because the party’s own leadership came from castes that benefited from maintaining these distinctions. The gap between Communist ideology and practice becomes particularly evident in how party members interact socially—they may advocate for economic redistribution, but they will not share meals with untouchables or allow their children to marry across caste lines (Tickell, 2007).
The novel’s critique of Communist leadership intensifies through its depiction of how the party responds to Velutha’s situation, revealing that political movements claiming to represent the oppressed can become instruments of their continued oppression. When Velutha’s relationship with Ammu threatens social order, the Communist Party leadership does not defend their comrade but instead quietly endorses the violence against him, recognizing that protecting an untouchable who transgressed caste boundaries would cost them upper-caste support. Roy shows Communist leaders making calculated political decisions that sacrifice lower-caste members to maintain electoral viability and social legitimacy among dominant castes. This portrayal suggests that revolutionary movements can be co-opted by existing power structures when leaders prioritize organizational survival over ideological principles. The Communist Party’s failure to protect Velutha demonstrates that political parties claiming to represent marginalized groups often betray those groups when their interests conflict with maintaining institutional power. Through this critique, Roy reveals that formal political power without genuine commitment to dismantling social hierarchies merely creates new elites who speak the language of liberation while practicing the politics of exclusion (Mullaney, 2002).
What Is Velutha’s Relationship With Communism?
Velutha’s relationship with Communism represents genuine ideological commitment from someone who has everything to gain from revolutionary social transformation, making his ultimate betrayal by the party particularly tragic and revealing. As an untouchable who experiences caste discrimination daily, Velutha embraces Communist ideology not as abstract political theory but as a practical framework for understanding and challenging his oppression. He actively participates in party activities, attends meetings, and genuinely believes in the movement’s promise of equality and human dignity regardless of birth. Roy portrays Velutha as someone who takes Communist principles seriously, believing that political solidarity can transcend caste divisions and that the party represents a genuine alternative to traditional social hierarchies. His commitment contrasts sharply with upper-caste party members who treat Communism as fashionable politics or a path to power rather than a transformative ideology demanding fundamental social restructuring (Outka, 2011).
Velutha’s skilled carpentry and technical abilities further underscore Roy’s critique of how caste operates even within supposedly egalitarian political movements. Despite being more educated and capable than many upper-caste characters, Velutha remains trapped within his caste identity in ways that Communist Party membership cannot overcome. Roy emphasizes that Velutha’s exceptional skills—his ability to repair machinery, his craftsmanship, his intelligence—should theoretically make him valuable to the movement, yet these abilities count for nothing when he transgresses the unwritten caste codes that even communists respect. His relationship with Ammu represents not merely personal desire but a radical enactment of Communist principles about human equality, demonstrating through his actions what the party only discusses in abstract terms. The violent response to this relationship and the party’s complicit silence reveal that Velutha’s sincere belief in Communist equality was naïve, that the movement never intended to challenge caste boundaries in practice, only to redistribute economic resources within existing social structures. His fate demonstrates that lower-caste individuals who take revolutionary rhetoric literally become dangerous to movements that prefer symbolic rather than substantive transformation (Needham, 2005).
How Does the Novel Depict Communist Contradictions?
The novel systematically exposes contradictions within Kerala’s Communist movement by juxtaposing revolutionary rhetoric with reactionary social practice, particularly regarding caste, gender, and family structures. Roy depicts Communist Party members who deliver speeches about worker solidarity and economic justice while simultaneously exploiting their own workers and maintaining rigidly hierarchical relationships within their households and businesses. Chacko, though not explicitly a party member, embodies the upper-caste intellectual who speaks progressive language while exercising feudal authority over his family and employees. The broader Communist community in Ayemenem displays similar contradictions—advocating for social equality in public forums while maintaining exclusive social circles, arranged marriages within caste boundaries, and discriminatory practices that preserve their privileged positions. These contradictions reveal that political ideology without personal transformation merely provides sophisticated vocabulary for justifying existing inequalities rather than challenging them (Coundouriotis, 1999).
Roy particularly emphasizes the Communist movement’s gender contradictions, showing how male party members who advocate for workers’ rights remain deeply patriarchal in their treatment of women. The novel suggests that Kerala’s communists, like their counterparts elsewhere, failed to address how caste oppression intersects with gender oppression, treating women’s liberation as secondary to class struggle. Ammu’s experience demonstrates this failure—as a divorced woman seeking autonomy and sexual agency, she finds no support from the Communist movement, which views her desires as threatening to social stability rather than as legitimate expressions of human freedom. The party’s response to her relationship with Velutha reveals that communists prioritized controlling women’s sexuality to maintain caste boundaries over defending women’s right to choose their partners. This gendered dimension of Communist failure demonstrates that revolutionary movements can reproduce patriarchal structures even while claiming to liberate all workers, showing how multiple systems of oppression intersect and reinforce each other despite ideological commitments to equality (Agarwal, 2007).
Why Did Kerala’s Communist Movement Fail Lower-Caste Members?
Kerala’s Communist movement failed lower-caste members, according to Roy’s portrayal, because the movement was fundamentally controlled by upper-caste individuals who were unwilling to sacrifice their own social privileges for genuine equality. The novel demonstrates that while communists could advocate for economic reforms that improved conditions for all workers, including untouchables, they could not or would not challenge the cultural and social dimensions of caste that maintained upper-caste superiority in everyday life. Economic redistribution without social transformation left intact the symbolic and psychological structures that marked untouchables as inferior, polluting, and unworthy of full human dignity. Roy suggests that this selective radicalism was not accidental but strategic—upper-caste communists could maintain moral authority by championing economic justice while preserving the social distinctions that gave them status even in a more economically equal society. The movement’s failure regarding caste reveals the limits of political ideologies that focus exclusively on economic class without addressing how other forms of identity and hierarchy intersect with economic structures (Tickell, 2007).
The novel also suggests that the Communist movement failed because it prioritized electoral success and institutional legitimacy over revolutionary transformation, making compromise with existing power structures inevitable. By the time of the novel’s setting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kerala’s Communist Party had achieved significant political power through democratic elections, which meant party leaders had electoral constituencies to maintain and governmental responsibilities to fulfill. This institutional position created pressure to moderate revolutionary demands and avoid alienating upper-caste voters who might support economic reforms but would never accept genuine caste equality. Velutha’s case perfectly illustrates this dynamic—defending him would require the party to explicitly challenge untouchability and risk losing upper-caste support, while abandoning him allows the party to maintain its coalition. Roy portrays this choice as revealing the fundamental character of the movement: when forced to choose between ideological principle and political expediency, Kerala’s communists consistently chose expediency. This critique suggests that revolutionary movements that seek power within existing systems inevitably become complicit with those systems, unable to challenge the fundamental structures they initially opposed (Mullaney, 2002).
What Alternative Does Roy Suggest to Failed Political Movements?
Rather than proposing explicit political alternatives, Roy’s novel suggests that genuine resistance to oppression operates through personal relationships that transgress social boundaries and through the preservation of alternative narratives that challenge official histories. The relationship between Ammu and Velutha represents this alternative—not a political program but a lived rejection of the social codes that structure inequality. Their love crosses caste and gender boundaries simultaneously, refusing the authority of both traditional hierarchy and modern political movements to dictate legitimate relationships. Roy portrays this personal transgression as more revolutionary than Communist Party politics precisely because it directly challenges the social reproduction of inequality in intimate life rather than merely advocating for economic redistribution. The novel suggests that transformation requires individual courage to violate oppressive social norms, even knowing that such violations will be violently punished. This emphasis on personal resistance does not romanticize individual action but rather shows its costs and limits while insisting on its moral necessity (Outka, 2011).
The novel’s narrative structure itself offers an alternative to failed political movements by preserving marginalized voices and counter-narratives that official histories suppress. Roy’s decision to tell the story primarily from the perspectives of children, women, and lower-caste characters enacts a form of resistance to dominant narratives that erase these perspectives. The novel preserves Velutha’s humanity against the dehumanizing narratives used to justify his murder, maintains Ammu’s perspective against patriarchal dismissal of her desires and experiences, and centers the twins’ traumatized voices against adult attempts to suppress uncomfortable truths. This narrative resistance suggests that genuine alternatives to oppressive systems begin with refusing to accept official versions of events, with insisting on the validity of marginalized experiences, and with creating spaces where suppressed stories can be told. Roy implies that cultural production—literature, art, storytelling—can serve revolutionary purposes when it challenges the narratives that legitimize inequality, offering a form of resistance that complements but differs from formal political organizing. The novel thus presents itself as an intervention in the politics of representation, arguing that changing whose stories get told and whose perspectives are centered constitutes necessary work toward social transformation (Needham, 2005).
How Does Roy Connect Communist Failure to Broader Social Structures?
Roy connects the Communist movement’s failures to broader patterns of how social structures reproduce themselves across different political systems and historical periods, suggesting that superficial political change leaves deeper structures intact. The novel emphasizes continuities between colonial hierarchies, postcolonial social arrangements, and communist-governed Kerala, showing that formal political transformation does not automatically dismantle cultural and social hierarchies built over centuries. The Syrian Christian community’s maintenance of caste distinctions despite both Christianity’s theoretical universalism and Communism’s egalitarian ideology demonstrates how social structures persist through informal practices, intimate relationships, and psychological internalization even when officially rejected. Roy suggests that systems like caste operate not merely through explicit rules and laws but through thousands of daily practices, assumptions, and interactions that continuously reproduce hierarchy regardless of which political party holds power (Coundouriotis, 1999).
The novel further demonstrates how different forms of oppression—caste, gender, class, colonial legacy—intersect and reinforce each other in ways that single-issue political movements cannot address. The Communist focus on class struggle, while valuable, proved insufficient because caste operates differently than class and cannot be dismantled through economic redistribution alone. Similarly, the movement’s failure to seriously address gender oppression meant that lower-caste women like Ammu faced multiple, intersecting forms of marginalization that the party’s economic analysis could not adequately theorize or challenge. Roy’s intersectional critique suggests that effective resistance to oppression requires understanding how multiple systems work together to maintain inequality, and that movements addressing only one dimension of oppression will inevitably fail to liberate those who experience multiple, overlapping forms of marginalization. This analysis implies that successful transformative politics must be more complex, addressing economic, social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of oppression simultaneously rather than prioritizing one form of inequality over others. The novel thus offers not merely a critique of Kerala’s Communist movement but a broader argument about the requirements for genuine social transformation (Agarwal, 2007).
Conclusion
Arundhati Roy’s portrayal of the Communist movement in The God of Small Things constitutes a devastating critique of how revolutionary political movements can fail the very people they claim to represent. Through Velutha’s tragedy and the party’s complicit silence, Roy demonstrates that formal ideological commitment to equality means little without willingness to challenge the social and cultural structures that reproduce inequality in everyday life. The novel reveals that Kerala’s Communist Party, despite its electoral success and progressive rhetoric, ultimately prioritized maintaining institutional power over defending lower-caste members whose liberation would threaten upper-caste support. This failure reflects broader patterns of how political movements become invested in existing systems even while claiming to transform them, showing that genuine social change requires more than redistributing economic resources—it demands fundamental restructuring of social relationships, cultural values, and psychological identities. Roy’s critique suggests that effective resistance to oppression must operate on multiple levels simultaneously, combining political organizing with personal transgression, economic analysis with cultural transformation, and institutional change with intimate revolution. The novel ultimately argues that failed political movements teach crucial lessons about the gaps between ideology and practice, the persistence of social structures across political changes, and the necessity of forms of resistance that challenge not merely economic arrangements but the entire web of relationships through which inequality reproduces itself across generations.
References
Agarwal, R. (2007). Traversing gender and caste in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 43(2), 141-155.
Coundouriotis, E. (1999). Materialism, the uncanny, and history in Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4(2), 331-347.
Mullaney, J. (2002). Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and the ethics of testimony. College Literature, 29(2), 19-39.
Needham, A. D. (2005). The small voice of history in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 7(3), 369-391.
Outka, E. (2011). Trauma and temporal hybridity in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Contemporary Literature, 52(1), 21-53.
Tickell, A. (2007). Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Routledge.